The present disclosure relates to an image forming apparatus and an image formation method, and more particularly relates to an image forming apparatus and an image formation method that can reduce the occurrence of discard of a toner image caused by paper delay.
Conventionally, in printing performed by a print device, a paper jam often occurs. As the cause of the paper jam, there are various causes such as an ambient temperature, humidity, the internal temperature of the print device and the type of print sheet. There are a plurality of technologies for predicting the occurrence of an abnormal state such as the paper jam described above, and in such technologies, an index value is calculated from a plurality of types of information related to the state of an image forming apparatus, and thus the occurrence of the abnormal state is predicted. Hence, since the types of information include information with no consideration given to the effect of individual variations (manufacturing variations) in the image forming apparatus, it is disadvantageously impossible to properly predict the occurrence of an abnormal state.
Hence, in order to solve such a problem, a print device is proposed that includes an acquisition portion which acquires print conditions, a print control portion which performs control for executing printing under the acquired print conditions and a storage portion which stores, based on whether or not the printing is successful, print results for each of the print conditions. The print control portion uses the print results to predict the probability of occurrence of a failure in printing under the acquired print conditions, and when it is predicted that a failure is highly likely to occur, printing is executed under similar print conditions in which a failure is unlikely to occur. Here, examples of the print conditions include temperature, humidity, an internal temperature, the type of sheet, a paper feed tray, single-sided or double-sided printing, monochrome printing/color printing, a ratio between characters and images and the amount of toner consumed. When a print failure rate corresponding to the acquired print conditions exceeds a predetermined reference value, the print control portion predicts that a failure is more likely to occur, and performs printing under other print conditions which are partially different from the above-mentioned print conditions and in which the print failure rate is less than the reference value. In this way, even when individual variations occur in the print device, by a method simpler than a conventional method, it is possible to accurately predict the occurrence of an abnormal state such as a paper jam to enhance the success rate of printing.